covid-19

Abstract

The Covid-19 disease broke out for the first time in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Since then the disease has spread all over the world and was declared as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. Covid-19 has caused mental and emotional distress in people all over the world and has disrupted economic activities, education, international trade and has caused an economic collapse in some countries. Therefore understanding the risks associated with the virus and responding appropriately is crucial to minimize the damage caused by pandemic and to recover from it. The objective of this report is to help the policy makers of the Republic of Guyana in decision making with regards to the pandemic. An exploratory analysis is performed to identify Confirmed cases, Deaths due to Covid-19 and Recoveries in Guyana and a comparison is done between three other neighboring countries. After analyzing data it can be concluded that the total deaths to total recovery ratio has been improving showcasing the successful attempt of Guyana s’ Health Sector in preventing deaths due to covid-19.



Introduction


Background

Guyana, officially The Co-operative Republic of Guyana is a country in South American continent. Guyana is a part of the Caribbean Region. The country amounts to a total population of 786,552 people making it the second least-populous sovereign state in South America. The capital of Guyana is Georgetown and Guyana is the only South American country in which English is the official language. Guyana recorded the first case of covid -19 on 11th March 2020, a 52 year old woman traveling from New York.



Location and Climatic Conditions of Guyana


Location of Guyana on the World Map

Guyana is geographically bounded by the Atlantic ocean to the north, Brazil to the south and south-west, Venezuela to the west and Suriname to the east. Guyana is the third smallest sovereign state by area in mainland South America with a geographical area of 214,970 km2. Guyana is a country with rich biodiversity and contrasting landscapes from rain forests to dry sand belts. Guyana has one of the largest unspoiled rain forests in South America with more than 80% of the country still covered by forests.
High temperatures, heavy rainfall with small seasonal differences, high humidity, and high average cloud cover provide climatic characteristics of an equatorial lowland. Temperatures are remarkably uniform. The constant heat and high humidity are mitigated near the coast by the trade winds.


Demographic Summary of Guyana


In this section we are trying to get a brief Demographic summary of Guyana to better understand the impact of covid-19 within Guyanese community. We discuss about the gender compostion and the age composition of Guyanese people, because discussing about these two demographic measures is very important as it has been discovered in many studies all around the world, that Covid-19 infection indicates a special vulnerability towards older adults and high infection and mortality rate has been discovered among aged population. And it was also observed that While men and women show similar rate of getting infected, men tend to show a higher mortality, independent of age.

Data Source : The World Bank Data

 

According to the above graph the percentage of males in Guyana is higher than the pecentage of females indicating a small degree of vulnerablitiy in Guyanese population.

Data Source : The World Bank Data


The above figure indicates that almost 65% of Guyanese community consist of people in the age group 15 to 64. However the propotion of people over 65 years of age is at a low value of almost 7% taking away a small degree of risk due to aged population



Lockdown status and Government Actions against Covid-19 in Guyana


Date Action taken by Government
18th March 2020 The Guyana Civil Aviation Authority closed the country’s airports to incoming international passenger flights for 14 days and all schools were closed
19th March 2020 The Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) closed Guyanese airspace to all international arrivals
25th March 2020 The government decided people exhibiting signs of COVID-19 infection or who have traveled abroad to be tested
30th March 2020 Curfew effecting from 6 am to 6 pm was imposed in the region Upper Demerara- Berbice
31st March 2020 The government decided not to impose lock downs or curfew contrasting to other countries in the region
2nd April 2020 Bars, restaurants and places of entertainment were closed between 6 pm to 6 am
3rd April 2020 A nationwide curfew was imposed with reported cases being 19 and reported deaths being 4
8th April 2020 All the post offices were closed and Public transport may only carry half the number of passengers they are licensed to carry
11th April 2020 The government set ip 4 quarantine facilities within the country
12th April 2020 Government gave the approval for private hospitals to test for covid-19
23rd April 2020 Government dispatched mobile COVID-19 testing units across the country
1st May 2020 The curfew was extended till June 3rd
3rd June 2020 The country remained in partial lock down until September 30th.only Guyana nationals, international workers and diplomats allowed to return on one of the scheduled repatriation flights once they have completed the repatriation form and process
12th Oct 2020 Return of some commercial flights for Guyanese citizens, international workers and diplomats
29th January 2021 Guyana received first batch of vaccines by COVAX facility
11th February 2021 Guyana commences the distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine, AstraZeneca to Healthcare Workers
17th September 2021 Almost 22% of the population is fully vaccinated and 43% partially vaccinated



Exploratory Data Analysis


Structure of Data

The data set used under this study is available in the package “coronavirus” in RStudio and consist of daily data from 22nd january 2020 to 4th August 2021 all over the world. The data set consist of data under the following variables.

  • Date
  • Country
  • Province
  • Lattitude of the location of country
  • Longitude of the location of country
  • Type of the recorded case : Confirmed cases / Deaths / Recoveries
  • Number of daily cases

However for Guyana data for the occurrence of cases with respect to the province was not available, hence have been dropped in the analysis.

Summary Statistics for Guyana

Daily incidence of Covid-19 cases in Guyana

      date              country               lat            long       
 Min.   :2020-01-22   Length:560         Min.   :4.86   Min.   :-58.93  
 1st Qu.:2020-06-10   Class :character   1st Qu.:4.86   1st Qu.:-58.93  
 Median :2020-10-28   Mode  :character   Median :4.86   Median :-58.93  
 Mean   :2020-10-28                      Mean   :4.86   Mean   :-58.93  
 3rd Qu.:2021-03-17                      3rd Qu.:4.86   3rd Qu.:-58.93  
 Max.   :2021-08-04                      Max.   :4.86   Max.   :-58.93  
   confirmed          death           recovered      
 Min.   :  0.00   Min.   : 0.0000   Min.   :   0.00  
 1st Qu.:  1.00   1st Qu.: 0.0000   1st Qu.:   0.00  
 Median : 26.00   Median : 0.0000   Median :  17.00  
 Mean   : 40.46   Mean   : 0.9804   Mean   :  39.87  
 3rd Qu.: 65.00   3rd Qu.: 2.0000   3rd Qu.:  55.00  
 Max.   :331.00   Max.   :13.0000   Max.   :1144.00

Daily confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries due to Covid-19 in Guyana

Guyana have recorded 22,658 confirmed cases as of 8th August 2021 with the first covid-19 case being recorded on 11th March 2020. And the highest number of confirmed cases recorded in a day amounts to 331 cases which was recorded on 24th June 2021. The highest number of deaths recorded within a day is 13 deaths being recorded on 26th May 2021. So far the highest number of recoveries has been recorded as 1144 people, on 3rd august 2021. The graph indicates two waves of covid-19, the first wave between July 2020 to January 2021 recording comparatively low occurrence of cases and the second wave between March 2021 to present. Somehow the numbers are decreasing currently.


Total incidence of Covid-19 cases in Guyana

Total confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries due to Covid-19 in Guyana

Guyana has recorded 22,538 total cases as of 2nd August 2021 and 541 total deaths due to corona virus. From the 22,538 confirmed cases 21,183 people have been recovered. The number of active cases in Guyana have been decreasing since May 2021. The active cases graphs indicates the above mentioned two waves of covid-19 as well, where we can see the impact of second wave to be higher than the first wave.



Covid-19 status of Guyana Compared to other Neighbouring Countries


In this study we compare the covid-19 statistics of Guyana with 3 other neighboring countries in the Caribbean region. The following figure shows the locations of the neighboring countries and also gives an idea about their population. Compared to Venezuela and Haiti, Guyana and Suriname is very less populous which gives us sense of comparative importance on number of covid-19 cases against each countries’ population. 

   Countries Population Longitudes Latitudes
1     Guyana     786552  -58.93018  4.860416
2      Haiti   11402528  -72.28520 18.971200
3   Suriname     586632  -56.02780  3.919300
4 Venezueala   28435940  -66.58970  6.423800

Comparing Total confirmed Covid-19 cases



The above figure indicates that among the 4 countries chosen for the comparison Guyana has recorded the first incidence of confirmed case on 12th March 2020. By 12th of June 2020 all three of the other countries has surpassed the total number of confirmed covid-19 cases in Guyana. As of 4th august 2021 Guyana the total confirmed cases of Guyana is lower than Venezuela and Suriname but higher than Haiti.

Comparing Total deaths from Covid-19



When comparing the total deaths due to covid-19 with the neighboring countries the first death occurred in Guyana on 12th March 2020. By 8th of July 2020 all the other three countries surpassed Guyana with their total number of deaths due to covid-19.As of 4th August 2021 Guyana reports the lowest number of total deaths compared to the other three countries.

Discussion and Conclusion

During the data analysis process some negative values were identified for confirmed cases of Guyana as well as other countries, this might be due to corrections done for some PCR tests that erroneously diagnosed patients as positive even when they are a not infected. Also there were some negative values for recorded deaths and recoveries. All these negative values were treated as missing values and dropped from the data set during the analysis. Also there were missing values for recoveries which were also dropped from the data set during the analysis.


In the case of comparing covid-19 status with other countries neighboring countries like Brazil was not taken into consideration due to the very large scale difference between data which made it hard to draw insights from the graphs.

Total deaths to Total confirmed cases Ratio

From the above figure we can see that total deaths to total confirmed ratio which was very high at the beginning of the pandemic now has become closer to zero, indicating that the health sector of Guyana is successful in preventing deaths due to covid-19. Therefore it is safe to say that Guyana is dealing with the pandemic situation pretty well.



References